Another common interviewing mistake professionals make is winging it. If you don’t practice for your interviews, you’re only hurting your own career and disrespecting the interviewer.
If you don’t care about your chances of getting the job, then don’t bother going to the interview at all.
Practice Your Interviewing Skills
Interviewing for a job is stressful. But that only becomes worse if you don’t prepare for it beforehand.
Interviewing is similar to every other skill—you have to practice in order to improve. Unfortunately, applicants only go through the interview process a few times in their entire careers.
The only way to do that is through practice.
There are a lot of ways you can do this but the easiest way is to practice answering questions in front of the mirror. The next level is to record yourself in a video and look at your performance later.
However you want to practice, the important part here is to actually say out the words. Not just answer the questions in your head.
Consequences of Being Unprepared
It’s impossible to know every question that will be asked in an interview. But that doesn’t excuse you from preparing from these types of questions.
If you don’t prepare for your interview, you risk not getting the job.
Unless you’re Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, sure, you can opt not to prepare. You don’t even need a resume for that matter.
But you’re not.
Not preparing for an interview just shows that you are naive, disrespectful, and not serious about the process. This is what the interviewer is thinking if she asks you a few questions and you keep stuttering or giving one-sentence answers.
Frankly, it has the same effect as not answering the questions.
You Can Never Be Too Rehearsed
One argument people make against preparing is you’ll sound rehearsed.
With the stress of being interviewed, getting asked different variations of questions, and a whole lot of factors—you can never give an answer that’s 100% word-for-word that you practiced.
Even then, that only happens if you do spend memorizing the answer. The vast majority of applicants don’t even practice so this isn’t a concern.
For those who do, what you say and how you say it will differ every single time. The stress in your voice, the pressure of the interview, and even how much you slept the night before affects everything you do and say.
That’s why saying that you don’t want to practice because you’ll sound rehearsed is not a valid excuse.
It’s just another way to be lazy.
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